When an emergency call is initiated by a caller, communication service providers (CSPs), such as phone service providers or carriers are responsible for connecting the emergency call to an appropriate Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP). A PSAP is a call center responsible for answering emergency calls directed to an emergency telephone number (e.g., a 911 call in the United States) for an emergency service such as a police service, a firefighting service, or an ambulance service. The PSAP often also dispatches the emergency services to the location of the caller. Governing bodies will typically assign PSAPs to cover a particular area such that emergency calls originating within the area are directed to the PSAP covering the area. An emergency call may refer to any type of emergency communication such as a traditional 911 voice call, a 911 text message, a 911 voice over IP (VOIP) call, an emergency call using a number other than 911, etc.
In existing systems, determining the particular PSAP to which an emergency call is to be routed typically involves a process of determining the approximate location of the call, comparing the approximate location to a grid of PSAP boundaries, and then connecting the call to the telephone number of the appropriate PSAP. A typical emergency call center of a communication service provider infrastructure includes a number of components responsible only for emergency calls including Selective Routers. Traditionally, a Selective Router is the component that determines the location of the originator of the emergency call and routes the call to the appropriate PSAP. The Selective Router typically queries a selective routing database to match the origination of the call to the network location of the appropriate PSAP.
The emergency call system is a complicated system with many components, all of which may become inoperative due to misconfiguration of components or other issues such as hardware failure, network outage, software error, and power outage. Currently, backup systems are implemented in case of failure. However, if there are component misconfiguration issues, the misconfiguration issues are likely to also affect the backup systems as well, and the emergency call will be unable to be placed. These type of outages leading to the inability to complete an emergency call have led to harm and loss of life to the general population, and have resulted in large fines for the service providers obligated to provide such emergency communications.
The illustrative embodiments recognize that existing procedures for emergency call service backup are reliant upon proper configuration and function of the backup system of the communication system provider that are subject to failure do to hardware failure, misconfiguration, and other issues. The illustrative embodiments recognize that it would be useful to provide a backup system for emergency services with the ability to route around failures in call routing between the caller's device and the end PSAP's customer premise equipment (CPE) using device user plane communications.